Escaping “Escape”: Why Bitcoin, Ketamine, QAnon and Mars Are the Same Damn Problem

It all comes down to people who want to “exit” themselves

In October 2010, in Hollywood, CA, the cheerily-named “Libertopia” conference held its inaugural event.

The festival particularly attracted those interested in "small-government": minarchists, voluntaryists, agorists, and anarchists. The events included speeches, films, music, and an awards banquet where two individuals are presented "The Sovereign Awards for Lifetime Achievement" for their contributions towards the advancement of individuality and voluntaryism.

Here’s how it advertised itself:

Hardly the stuff of nightmares. Nevertheless, the event was significant because of one speaker in particular who was an odd fit with would-be sovereign citizens, preppers and other freedom-seekers—Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.

Here’s an excerpt from the speech summarizing his basic message [emphasis added]:

“I don't think despair is the only answer. And I don't think, and it's because I don't think politics is the only way to go. And my thinking on this, you know, started to take a turn towards a more optimistic perspective in the mid to late '90s when I got involved in the tech boom in Silicon Valley.

I ended up being the co-founder of a company called PayPal where -- and the initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world. And, you know, we can debate on how much it succeeded or how little it succeeded. And there were parts of it that I think have worked, and parts of it were, you know, the jury is still out. But the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things. Because we were in such a small minority.

But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through a technological means. And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.

And, you know, there are a number of different technologies we can outline, but the task in this world where politics has become so broken and so dysfunctional is to find a way to escape from it. It's not a way to fix it. It is a way to escape. And there are, you know, a number of different options. I think the promising one of the 1990s and this last decade has been to escape onto the Internet and to sort of create an alternate virtual reality. Questions, of course, is still how does it intersect with the real world? There are, I think, escaping to outer space is a promise, although I think the space technology is not quite there. So I think that's sort of for the second half of the 21st century.

I think we can try to, you know, create autonomous countries on oceans, underwater, all sorts of other spaces. But I think technology is the vehicle for how we should be looking to escape and move beyond politics as we find it today.”

There is a lot to this one quote. The most striking is that he’s openly talking about changing the world “unilaterally… we could never win an election on getting certain things, because we were in such a small minority.” He portrays technology and politics as locked in a “very, very close race,” a race he sees as existential that technology wins—and politics, including the system that provides it, not just loses, but is eliminated altogether.

But why? One word: escape. This is, at the bottom of all this, the problem. Our government and technology sector have naively and foolishly wed themselves to people who hate them—and us. Thiel said:

“the task in this world where politics has become so broken and so dysfunctional is to find a way to escape from it. It's not a way to fix it. It is a way to escape.”

More recently, the word “escape” has been replaced in billionaire propaganda as “exit.” Same thing. Basically, Peter Thiel and his friends are desperate for a way out—somewhere, anywhere but a free society on Planet Earth. Here are some of the “escape” plans Thiel was already either exploiting or planning in 2010.

• He saw the internet as “alternate virtual reality” to escape to, which is why he funded and amplified alternate reality campaigns for Bitcoin (Satoshi), Trump (Pizzagate), Flynn (QAnon) and pushed Musk to buy Twitter and turn it into a psychological warfare platform. Thiel said this in 2022.

  

• Thiel saw PayPal (now blockchain/crypto/BTC) as a way to “change the world” and “overturn the monetary system,” and escape the tyranny of any system at all. Bitcoin is PayPal 2.0, and an existential threat to the world economy. In 2010, it hadn’t even made its first transaction, for pizzas.

  Grand Theft Crypto: “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve”

• Thiel’s big idea was “autonomous countries” via “seasteading” which is now known as the “network state.” This is the most serious effort yet at forming some kind of “alt-nation-state” to the global world order. One of the biggest promoters is Curtis Yarvin, co-founder of the Dark Enlightenment, who runs Urbit, funded by Peter Thiel to be the “operating system of the network state.”

  Dis-integration: Machine Guns, Rotten Teeth & Plane Crashes

• Thiel saw elections and voting as the problem, and technology as the solution, a long time ago. The opinions of the people make no difference to him. Thiel said “even though I think politics is bad and voting is bad… we have to be very sensitive to the degree to which politics is constraining technology.” In other words, in the long term he planned to take people’s votes away, fifteen years ago.

Fast forward to my recent reporting on Elon Musk’s addiction to ketamine along with numerous other mind-altering drugs. What is that but an effort to escape? Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh was also determined to escape using a ketamine cocktail, and ended up dying in a shed fire, which is, I suppose, one way to do it.

Yikes. This Boy Ain’t Right.

So, really though, what are these broligarchs up to? And what are they really trying to escape?

My thesis here, and I think it’s important to understand in broader terms than the PayPal Mafia, is that they are trying to escape themselves.

As I reported, Peter Thiel was a sensitive gay boy raised in colonial apartheid South West Africa (now Namibia) in a Christian school where they still greeted each other with “Heil Hitler”—while his dad used Black slave labor to mine uranium for a secret South African nuclear program. Quite a rough way to start out.

Peter Thiel’s Radioactive Childhood

In summary, Peter Thiel wants to escape himself. He was brought up in an environment with parents who detested gay people, along with anyone who wasn’t white. Musk, similarly, was brought up by racist, abusive parents who programmed him to hate everyone but white, straight people, and taught him to want to escape—to Mars.

“The Elon”: How a Nazi Rocket Scientist Invented the World’s Richest Man

What Thiel and his cohorts have done is create separate alternate realities for people who want to escape. There are escape plans to Mars, to a “network state,” to a QAnon chat room of cult members, or to a cosmic ketamine k-hole. It’s all the same reflex for people who are, again, mostly unhappy with themselves.

Our job, should we choose to accept it, is to counter the narrative that “escape” is the answer. It never is. That’s what cowards do. We need to be the team that says “Hell no, we’re not trying to ‘exit,’ we want to stay right here and fight for our families, fight for our country, and fight for our planet. And you, billionaires, aren’t going to con us into believing in some magical fairyland.”

Long live a free America. Glory to Ukraine.

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